World Wide Web (WWW) services provided by many Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) servers connected to Internet can be used easily by manipulating HTTP viewer software such as Web browser which is executed on user terminals connected to the Internet.
Introduction of Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows easier Web browser manipulation. Also, The number of HTTP servers connected to Internet is increasing rapidly. Thus, users can obtain more information easily, and WWW services have become widespread rapidly.
An arbitrary image file is used for improving the operations through GUI, and a so-called button which associates a predetermined operation, link, and others to an image corresponding to the image file. As an example of such a button, a so-called banner advertisement is known in which an address such as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of a supply device for supplying a predetermined advertisement is mapped to an image showing a predetermined product, information and so on.
The banner advertisement is implemented with a button which is defined as a link to a predetermined URL in an HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) and an image file which is referred as an image mapped to the button.
A user manipulates a Web browser to instruct (that is, click) a button defined as a banner advertisement so that linked information can be referred easily.
Further, since WWW services are used for business transactions recently and therefore user access conditions, for example, can be researched more easily than general business transactions, they are used for marketing activities also.
As a method for performing such a research, following methods are known:
(1) One method including the steps of storing identification information, Cookie and so on inherent to each user using HTTP viewer software such as so-called Web browser on a user terminal, obtaining the identification information by an HTTP server when the user accesses to the HTTP server, and recording and analyzing a user access to the information provided by the HTTP server;(2) Another method including the steps of analyzing a packet sent from a user terminal connected to an Internet service provider (simply called ISP below), and recording and analyzing a user access to the information provided by the HTTP server; or(3) Still another method including the steps of recording and analyzing a user access in addition to information provided by an HTTP server such as access analysis software, an access record (log) of the HTTP server and so on through an application independent from the HTTP server.
As a specific example, a method using a Java (trademark) applet in order to record information matching to an access from a user in a file may be cited which is adopted in http://www.snippet.com/home.htm, for example.
However, in the above-described banner advertisement, since an image file and an HTML file including information indicating a real linked location are stored as separate files, it can be done relatively easily to associate a linked location other than a linked location which is originally associated with the image file with the image file by properly defining a description of an HTML file referring the image file. Thus, the image file may be illegally used.
Further, in the above-described access research, there is a room for improvement from the point of view of reality in the method (1) including that Cookie cannot be used in some settings of the HTTP viewer software implemented in the user terminal.
Furthermore, since Cookie is issued, managed and so on for every HTTP server, the access condition research cannot be performed in collaboration with another HTTP server, and since it is necessary to merge access conditions for each HTTP server for researching user access conditions to a plurality of HTTP servers, the research gets more difficult when the number of servers increases.
Still further, in the method (2), when the access condition research is tried to external HTTP servers operated in the outside of the ISP used by the user for connecting to Internet, an increased number of subjects to be researched makes the research highly difficult since the number of HTTP servers connected to the Internet is extremely high.
Further, in the method (3), the research cannot be performed easily because processing such as operating an application for performing the above-described research and analyzing a log is required independent from management of information and logs provided by the HTTP server and therefore complex operations such as identifying HTTP servers to be researched is required.
The present invention was made in view of the above-described problems, and it is an object of the present invention to surely provide information that a supplier of an image file desires to supply to a user of the image file. Further, it is an object of the present invention to provide a plurality of information that a supplier of an image file desires to supply to a user based on one image file.
Furthermore, it is an object of the present invention to allow relatively easier researches of user access conditions, for example.